Solutions

Funambol for Service Providers, Portals, Carriers and Device Makers

Mobile email is projected to grow rapidly for the next several years, mainly due to the mass market rather than the enterprise.

Why Mass Market Mobile Email?

Revenue from text messaging has plateaued, with ARPU starting to decline. With users getting more price sensitive towards SMS, providers need to adjust offerings to get mass market users to spend more on just text messaging.
With number portability, it is easier than ever for subscribers to jump ship for the next lower priced offering. It has become even more critical to introduce sticky and compelling data applications that reduce churn. Mass market mobile email can be the ultimate sticky application. With close to two billion email accounts, email is a solid communications preference for many people. Adding it to the mobile environment, in an easy and cost effective manner, could be a huge hit with subscribers.
As subscribers get hooked on mobile email, they will resist moving to another provider, as this might mean losing contacts and email addresses for family, friends and business associates.

Funambol Carrier Edition

Funambol offers the Carrier Edition for service providers, portals, mobile operators and device manufacturers. It provides a flexible and cost-effective solution to deliver mobile phone backup and push email capabilities to mass market users.

At the heart of Carrier Edition is the Funambol Data Synchronization (DS) Server. The DS Server is a J2EE application that synchronizes mobile devices with any backend data source such as email and groupware servers.The DS Server is the de facto implementation of SyncML 1.2, the Open Mobile Alliance's platform-independent standard for data synchronization. It is endorsed by leading mobile device manufacturers, operators and software vendors.

The majority of mobile phones from manufacturers such as Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and Siemens are pre-installed with SyncML and work out-of-the-box with the DS Server for synchronization of a phone's contacts, calendar, tasks and notes with any external data source. Mobile phones communicate with Funambol over HTTP. Any mobile device with the ability to access the Internet can also synchronize with Funambol. In addition, for Windows Mobile and Java-enabled phones, Funambol provides clients to deliver push email and PIM synchronization.

Carrier Edition builds on top of the DS Server to deliver a highly scalable and fault-tolerant solution for millions of mobile users. It includes these components:

Funambol DS Server
Funambol Portal
PostgreSQL or other enterprise-grade RDBMS
Apache Tomcat or other enterprise-grade app server
Funambol Connectors
Funambol sync clients for Win Mobile devices, iPods and MS Outlook
Funambol Java ME Push Email Client for mass-market Java-enabled phones from manufacturers such as Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson

Carrier Edition combines the benefits of the Funambol DS Server and Funambol Portal with the proven performance of an RDBMS and the high reliability and manageability of application servers to deliver a clustered, highly dynamic, scalable and fault-tolerant solution.

Funambol understands that when it comes to deployment, one size does NOT fit all. Carrier Edition has been designed from inception to offer maximum adaptability to accommodate varying branding needs and deployment architectures, including support for the operating system, database and application server of choice.

Note: this is adapted from the Frost & Sullivan white paper “Open Source Push Email & PIM for the Consumer Market”. Download the full white paper.